There’s a point to this, but wait for it. Meanwhile, it’s all true and includes a morbidly obese ninja. Newspapers were agog over a Welsh matron staggering home across the village green after a long night in the pub, when she was bitten by a ten-foot python. She thought she’d been stung by nettles until [...]
Students of Western cultural decline may find parallels in the aesthetic decay of Japan starting in the mid-nineteenth century. These four elements seem to have debased the graphic arts especially: technology, political reform and equality, industrialisation and wealth, and reduced popular support for traditional culture among new elites. In both places these factors overturned venerable [...]
Through the ages the death of civilizations, no less than the death of human beings, has fascinated unnumbered observers of the human condition. For those who seek examples of civilization’s perdurability, the historical record is not reassuring. After all, what is Sumeria today but eroding ziggurats on the plain of Shinar? What remains of the [...]